Thinking Like a State: Policing Dangerous Thought in Imperial Japan, 1900–1945

2022 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-60
Author(s):  
Max Ward

Abstract This article explores the changing ways the Japanese police understood and policed radical politics between 1900 and 1945. Specifically, it traces the process in which the objective of policing transformed from an emphasis on political organizations, their activities, publications, and assemblies in the 1900s to the policing of individuals ostensibly harboring “dangerous ideas” that were deemed threatening to state and capital—what the police came to categorize as “thought crime” by the late 1920s. Once “thought” was identified as an object for policing, Japanese police agencies began to practice a kind of intellectual history—thinking like a state—to distinguish dangerous thought and to understand its origin and its spread during the socioeconomic turbulence of the interwar period. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s theory of police, this article explores how police manuals and other publications categorized certain ideas, texts, enunciations, and slogans and distributed them based on the presumed degree of danger they posed to the imperial polity. It reveals how the expanded classifications and distributions of dangerous thought transformed policing in the 1920s, thereby extending imperial state power into various aspects of social life in interwar Japan.

Author(s):  
Max Ward

Abstract This paper explores how Japanese officials and others conceptualized police power at particular junctures in imperial Japanese history (1868–1945). It does so by synthesizing prior scholarship on the Japanese police into a broader genealogy of the police idea in prewar Japan, beginning with the first translations and explanations of police in the Meiji period, the changing perceptions of the police in the 1910s, and the evolution from the “national police” idea in the 1920s to the “emperor's police” in the late 1930s. The essay proposes that the police idea in Japan (and elsewhere) can be read as a boundary concept in which the changing conceptions of police power demarcate the shifting relationship between state and society. Indeed, it is the elusiveness of this boundary that allows for police power – and by extension, state power – to function within society and transform in response to social conditions. Approached in this way, the essay argues that the different permutations of the police idea index the evolving modality of state power in prewar Japan, and thus allows us to reconsider some of the defining questions of imperial Japanese history.


2021 ◽  
pp. 36-65
Author(s):  
Robert Schuett

Who shaped the early Kelsen’s style of thinking under the Kaiser? What were the intellectual circles in which he moved in fin-de-siècle Vienna and the interwar period before he left Austria for Cologne, Geneva, Prague, and the United States? The chapter explores ‘the other Kelsen’ by revisiting his formative years, as well as his work in the lecture halls of university and his high-profile roles in the War Ministry, Karl Renner’s state chancellery, and American foreign intelligence after escaping the fascist Continent. A reluctant jurist, Kelsen had a passion for philosophy and literature, and from Freud and the economists he learned that individual and social life was all about drives and desires, instincts and interests. Where Kelsen was, there was no land of utopia.


Aspasia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-77
Author(s):  
Magdalena Kozłowska

The article deals with the issue of Jewish youth movements’ contribution to women’s empowerment in interwar Poland using the example of the socialist movement Tsukunft. The article explores the movement’s politics of memory in the interwar period and the selection of heroines whom the young women of Tsukunft were supposed to emulate, as well as real-life examples of Bundist women activists of the interwar period who served them as role models. In its examination of this alternative to the examples proposed by the mainstream state narrative, the article offers a view of Jewish social life in Poland, but also asks more specific questions, such as the true nature of relationships between Bundist women and men.


2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-99
Author(s):  
Peter Bučka

Abstract In this article, the author deals with the foundation, development, results and reasons of disappearance of the most successful sports club in the interwar era; the Jewish swimming and sports club Bar Kochba Bratislava. After the birth of Czechoslovakia, sports in Slovakia could develop on a national basis. Large national minorities had the same possibilities. To eliminate the risk of misusing sports for political purposes, sport representatives decided to organise it on the ethnic principle instead of the regional one. Thanks to this a wide variety of national sports organisations were established, including some Jewish ones. Even though Jews constituted only 2.01% of the population in the interwar period in today’s territory of Slovakia (Bergerová, 1992: 108), they succeeded not only in sports but in other areas of social life as well.


2020 ◽  
pp. 23-61
Author(s):  
Durba Mitra

This chapter offers a conceptual history of the modern study of ancient Indian sex. It traces the intellectual history of how the philology of Sanskrit erotics, particularly through concepts of deviant female sexuality, shaped the modern study of social life. In doing so, the chapter reveals a history of how modern philological inquiry produced deviant female sexuality, as found in premodern Sanskrit text, as an originary object for the study of modern Indian society. What was lost in these new fixed structures of knowledge was the multiplicity of interpretations of different texts on premodern social life. Thus, this chapter examines the transregional rise of the field of Indological erotics in the period between the 1880s and the 1950s and beyond.


2020 ◽  
pp. 218-242
Author(s):  
James Pickett

This chapter assesses the ulama's relationship with state power. By the long nineteenth century, the ulama stood as a pillar of the state, limited though that state was. Islamic scholars systematically deployed their diverse Persianate skill set and leveraged Islamic knowledge on behalf of the Turkic nobility. Nevertheless, the ulama still envisioned the state as an Islamic state, and they carefully guarded their moral prerogative to speak for the religion both groups agreed had a total monopoly on politics and social life. Although in certain instances evidence exists of this most important of prerogatives — the authority to legitimately speak for religion — shifting in favor of the Turkic military elite, the ulama cultivated a spirit of moral independence and superiority to the state.


1974 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Weiler

None of the early Fabians remains more obscure today than William Clarke (1852-1901 ). Although his contribution to the Fabian Essays ranks as perhaps the most interesting and perceptive essay in that volume, histories of the Fabian Society pass over Clarke with a line or two of praise. Nevertheless, Clarke's socialism deserves more attention. It is interesting in itself as an early English analysis of monopoly capitalism and as another example of the relationship between the growth of radical politics and the Victorian loss of faith. At the same time, of course, Clarke's intellectual history also contributes to an increased understanding of the early evolution of the Fabian society.At the time Clarke wrote “The Industrial Basis of Socialism” for the Fabian Essays he had been a socialist for only a few years. And in spite of this promising beginning as a socialist theorist, he abandoned socialism in the late 1890's, reverting to a more youthful political individualism. Why Clarke remained a socialist for only a decade is, then, the central question raised by his career. Not surprisingly, the answer is complex, dependent in part on accidental personal factors. Clarke approached socialism from two different directions. Politically, it was a logical extension of his radicalism, a necessary corrective to the limitations placed on political democracy by uncontrolled private wealth. At the same time, Clarke came to see socialism as a kind of religious activity, the means to realize a spiritual ideal. In both cases socialism held out a promise of the imminent realization of these concerns.


Author(s):  
Usammah

Formalizing the Shari'a of Islam both in the realm of social and social life, in the state and nation are not infrequently debated, both socio-political and religious debates. The debate is in addition to understanding the teachings of religion and its relationship with the nation-state, as well as understanding the existing legal system within the country, especially that the country embraces a positive legal system that is more influenced by western law. The notion of enforcement of Islamic criminal law can not necessarily be carried out properly without any legislation and the establishment of a material Islamic criminal law as a positive law in force. Also, Islamic criminal law is a public law requiring state power both in law making and in law enforcement. In relation to the legislation and the formation of the law (qanun syariat Islam), the most interesting thing is how to determine the shape of the finger and its uqubat both belonging to the category of hudud, qisas and takzir as part of the Islamic Shari'a law enforcement system


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-29
Author(s):  
Norbert Varga

The regulations of the economic competition agreement were introduced by the 20th Act of 1931 after the economic crisis attention to the cartel regulations in Europe in the interwar period. We can realize that the regulation of the unfair business completion has a long codification history which started in the period of the Dualism. Before the end of dualism the Hungary regulated some question related to the cartels special attention to the circulation of commodities. In my presentation, I aim to describe the Hungarian and European codification antecedents and steps (for example: the regulation of industry) of the first Hungarian Cartel Act. This codification process was very important in Hungarian economy and social life because the economic changes started processes in both the field of legal life and legal sciences, and as a result of this, a demand arose to legally codify any rules in connection to cartels. The foundations of these were found in private law, especially in the regulations of the commercial law, which could be further elaborated upon and lead to a development of the regulations on the annulment of contracts in connection to dishonourable business competition.


2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 325
Author(s):  
Łukasz Szymański

<p>Conservatives in Galicia during the Austro-Hungarian monarchy exerted an overwhelming influence on political and social life. Among the conservative groups and parties, there were the so-called Podolaks, to which Wojciech Dzieduszycki belonged, writer, politician and philosopher. He wrote about the genesis and concept of law, the functions of the state and the scope of state power. He spoke against the law that regulates all manifestations of human life, because social relations are also regulated by moral and religious norms. Dzieduszycki was critical of socialism and all excessive forms of state intervention because he was against excessive state power. Based on Dzieduszycki’s reflections on the state and law, it can be concluded that he was an advocate of evolutionary conservatism.</p>


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